The Hardest Thing to Forgive

Forgiveness is one of the most misunderstood concepts in the psychological and spiritual literature. The misunderstanding usually goes in one of two directions: either it’s treated as something good people do easily and bad people refuse, or it’s confused with condoning — as if forgiving someone means saying what they did was acceptable.

Neither is right.

The working definition that holds up best, across both psychological research and contemplative practice, is this: forgiveness is the decision to stop carrying the cost of someone else’s actions.

What unforgiveness costs

Research on unforgiveness is fairly clear on the mechanism. Holding onto resentment activates the stress response. The person you’re angry at is, in most cases, not lying awake at night suffering over your opinion of them. The anger costs you far more than it costs them.

Everett Worthington, a psychologist at Virginia Commonwealth University who has spent decades studying forgiveness, often tells his research participants that he has a personal reason for this work: his mother was murdered in a home invasion in 1995. He worked for years on forgiving her killers.

He found the same thing he found in the research: the unforgiveness was a wound he was re-opening, repeatedly, at his own expense. The forgiveness was for him, not for them.

What forgiveness is not

Forgiveness does not require reconciliation. You can forgive someone and maintain no contact with them. You can forgive someone and still acknowledge clearly that what they did was wrong.

Forgiveness does not require that you feel warm toward the person. It doesn’t require a particular feeling at all. It is a decision — repeatedly renewed, because forgiveness is less an event than a practice — to release the grip on the grievance.

The self-forgiveness problem

Often harder than forgiving others: forgiving yourself. The same compassion we might extend to a friend who made a mistake — the recognition that people do harmful things without being irredeemably harmful, that change is possible, that punishment and growth are different things — we often refuse ourselves.

What would you say to a friend in your situation? Consider saying it to yourself.

The person who needs the forgiveness is often the one in the mirror. That doesn’t make it smaller. It makes it more urgent.